Shifting demographics and salaries

One area we've tracked for several years is the demographic makeup of professionals working in the online marketing industry. Among the shifts the survey has revealed is a rise in the number of women working in the field.

This year's respondents were 28.3% female, up from 20.7% in 2010, although theses numbers indicate we still have a long way to go.

The survey also examines salaries, as indicated by the graphic below showing the median salary by role of respondents around the world. The full data set (see below) contains even more granular information.

Median Salary by Role

Tools and strategies in 2014

In the age of (not provided), Google's Hummingbird update and changing practices in the world of link building and content marketing, the survey tracts both shifting tactics and tools inbound marketers most use to perform their jobs.

This year, we particularly wanted to know how marketers dealt with (not provided) keywords, as we've seen it's prevalence expand to over 75% worldwide.

How do marketers deal with (not provided)?

This represents only a small sampling of the data analyzed by Dr. Pete. Check out the complete results for more insight.

Bonus: Build your own content with the full data download

Moz is making all the data collected public under a Creative Commons license. This means you are free to use it for research, creating visual assets, or even producing your own content from the raw data, as long as you follow the requirements of the Creative Commons license.

We only published a portion of the data for this year's Industry Survey results, so the possibilities of what you can do with the remaining full data set are endless. You could segment the data by country, profession, salary or more, and publish the findings on your own site.

Thanks to our partners and contributors

We firmly believe in collecting this data for the benefit of the entire industry, and this effort wouldn't be possible without the help of our partners. A few of the companies that deserve special recognition:

Comments
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Cyrus, thanks for introducing the survey results! I haven't gone over all the raw data yet, but I just had a few thoughts on the summary that you presented. (Apologies if the answers are in the raw set!)

Gender Gap

While the overall gap within what I guess I'll call "digital marketing" is decreasing, I'd be very interested to see a percentage breakdown by discipline (SEO, social media, analytics, etc.). In my experience, men tend to be more interested in working with things (technical SEO and web development) while women tend to be more interested in working with people (PR and social media). Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, and there are always many exceptions. But I'd be curious to see such information -- if this is generally true, then are there hiring, staffing, and management implications?

International Presence

The top five countries are those that speak English -- which I guess would make sense since moz.com and Moz Analytics are (only?) in English. I wonder how many people searching in non-English languages for relevant topics find moz.com pages in search. (Long-term idea for Moz's marketing and SEO staff: One day use subdomains and/or subfolders and/or country-specific TLDs -- there's debate on that -- with translated pages and targeting different languages and/or countries!)

I'd be interested in taking the number of respondents by country and then calculating a percentage of the total population of each country. That may reveal some interesting data on whether interest in digital marketing is increasing, leveling off, or doing something else in each location.

Salaries

Good call on using the median and not the mode (average). I presume that locations such as India would bring the average way down and/or those such as the United States would bring it way up. But does the raw data include medians or modes for each country?

I'd also be curious to see increases or decreases overall and for each country. An increase may (or may not) mean that more companies are seeing the value of digital marketing and/or the economy is improving. A decrease may (or may not) mean that more digital marketers are entering the market and bringing down salaries.

Top Activities

I was surprised to see that content creation and social media are more of in-house than agency focuses. But I guess it makes sense. Perhaps this is because company executives think that their in-house teams always know the brand and specific details more and that it's more difficult to communicate these things to external agencies? Plus, it's easier to have practices such as social-media based customer service in-house than external. Since social media is merely yet another communications channel, I suppose it depends on for what one is using it.

But then: Why would content creation rank first for independent consultants but fourth for agencies? I don't really have an answer and will just throw it out for discussion.

Idea for the Future

In future surveys, I'd suggest perhaps offering some breakdowns that compare the B2B and B2C industries. I've found that strategies, tactics, and success metrics often differ. In just one example, B2C sites often want immediate sales while B2B companies with long sales cycles (like Hubspot, I'd suppose) prefer to get prospects to enter the funnel through downloading content and then pull them down bit by bit. For example, under Top Social Platforms, I'd bet that the list would be very different for B2C and B2B businesses.

Well, just a "few" initial thoughts before looking at the raw data. Moz and Cyrus, thanks again for taking the time to do this valuable survey!

Yes- it seems that "Link Building" as a job title is really taking a hit, although as far as I can tell people with this skill are still very highly sought after, those that can provide quality results anyway.

Couldn't agree more Samuel.. You're spot on! One thing that I'd like to add here is the top activities that the people are focusing now, by looking at this data we finally conclude that our industry has quite matured now.

Even with a large sample, our results are clearly biased toward our audience. I think it's telling that the international presence is so strong, even given that we're a US-based company and our resources and tools cater to the english-speaking market. It gives you a hint of just how strong the international market really is.

Re: Top Activities, I think it's more a matter that agency time is a bit more split. There's often more day-to-day project and client management, for example. So, that could make the numbers for content creation and other tasks look lower. We asked for percentage breakdowns, essentially, which is a bit different than hours in the day. Then again, if you're splitting your time more, you're spending less hours on any given thing. In-house content people may have a bit more freedom to focus - I know I certainly have more of that luxury than when I was handling multiple clients.

Great question! Many of these would be answerable via the raw data. If someone wanted to do further analysis and publish the findings on their own website, we'd love to know about it. For example, in addition to breaking down gender by role, you could do the same with salaries and/or countries.

Anyways - no doubt that there are more women in PR, Content, and Social.

I'm currently hiring a new Social Media Coordinator, and over 80% of the candidates are women, most of them below 30!

But regarding the general gap shrinking, I'm very happy to see it.

I'd also love to see the median salaries by country. What also is interesting (not from this survey) is that in the US specifically there are big differences between different cities and states.

Regarding the top actives for "In-House" and agencies, first of all I loved it, second - it's no surprise: There's no doubt that agencies tend to run an audit, do their keyword/competitor research, and look for the fastest possible results (and it's not their fault, this is what the clients want). In house marketers on the other hand look further down the road, and Social Media is a long term investment in most cases.

And by the way I was kind of surprised that Israel isn't in the top 10 countries list, but OK :)

I love this sort of stuff. Always makes for a fun read and interesting interpretations of data.

When you look at the median salary by role and compare it by the median salary by experience, I think you can see how relatively new some roles in the industry, and how new some people within that role in the industry are. Digital marketing, particularly SEO, is still in its infancy. Adweek had an interesting article on this topic and what it called the 'digital talent gap'. In many ways it's a "buyers' market" and some professionals out there can take advantage of that.

Also, I'd like to ask about the shrinking gender gap. Nice to see it falling, but worth checking that the numbers of people who responded over 2011, 2012 and 2013. Has the overall numbers of people responding, plus women, increased? Or has it just been the proportion increasing, but really the number of respondents has stagnated or declined?

And on that topic, just because 28.3% of respondents were women does not necessarily mean we have "a long way to go" in terms of gender equality. As a feminist (no, really), I'd be more concerned at looking at the barriers of entry into the industry for women and if there are any unjust artificial blocks there.

Now, you could say that a misogynous tone overlies women in the workplace as a whole. Unfortunately, varying degrees of that are still abound from workplace to workplace. However, when it comes to digital marketing I'd say that it is one of the most progressive industries for equality in the workplace (judging from what I can see in the UK and US). I can't remember the last time such a problem has occurred in the industry or when a woman has highlighted the problem (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm obviously on the wrong side of the gender divide for this!).

In many ways, I think digital marketing has gone very far indeed in terms in abolishing a gender divide. You can't always judge that progress by numbers (even though numbers make for such great evidence), as entering the industry is always a choice. To give a comparison, studies have said that the percentage of women in HR can be as high as 72%. Does that necessarily mean it's an industry that discriminates against men, or that men struggle to get into HR roles as a profession? I wouldn't say so.

Sorry for the complete side-track there, but studies such as these always get me thinking and wanting to take part in discussions - so I hope to see many more in the comments! Thank you once again for taking the time to put the data together, along with your analysis, for yet another year.

My editor tried to steer me away from using the phrase "a long way to go" but that's how I really feel. I would love to see more women at high levels in the industry, speaking at more conferences, and running more agencies.

You are right though Tom, gender equality is a complex issue. I am neither smart enough or experienced to explain it in a few short sentences. :)

Regardless, our goal was not to draw broad generalizations about the data, but simply report and observe changes and identify trends. On a completely personal note, I am happy to see the number of women rising, and I hope that's a trend that continues.

Thank you for this survey, there's a lot of fascinating information in there and I'm excited to take a closer look at the data. To go back to the gender equality discussion, I think it would be interesting to look at salaries according to gender. In the work sphere in general (and sadly, universally) women tend to be receive lower remuneration for equivalent qualifications/responsibilities. If the gender gap is shrinking in the profession, are the salaries reflecting this higher equality?

Unfortunately, the university trend doesn't always reflect the working world. When I was in graduate school, I noticed that about 80%+ of undergraduate psychology majors (at my university) were female. Among grad students, it was closer to 60%. Among faculty, the ratio dropped to maybe 20-30%. I honestly don't know what happened along the way, but the numbers were stark, and something definitely happened. You may see 80%+ women in your marketing classroom, but ask yourself - how many CMOs are female? Something's still happening along the way, and the numbers skew more as you move upward.

Yay for male feminist! So many people don't understand that gender equality is supposed to benefit everyone (i.e. destroy patriarchy AND matriarchy where it exists).

Anywho, I just wanted to chime in that support. And also say I would love to see a look at ethnic demographics - though I know there could really be some pushback on the relevance. As a black female, however, I'm often wondering if I'm aloooooone out here :)

Yeah, I think where we are and where we "should" be are certainly complex questions. Unfortunately, we've had a tendency to think that, because digital marketing is a relatively new, young field, sexism isn't such a problem. We like to think sexism and racism are somehow isolated to old, white men. Sadly, the experiences of women in tech over the past couple of decades don't seem to back this idea up - there's still rampant sexism in some circles and this impacts opportunity.

Generally, I think that a shrinking gap can help this problem, and is a positive sign. Will every industry someday be 50/50? No, and that's not necessarily even the ideal situation. When you look at the diversity of skills and interests in online marketing, though, and see that women were only 1/5 of the population in our 2010 data, I think something's still skewed. So, I take this as a good trend.

While I know the tech industry has tended to have a lack of women, I never thought SEO/SEM was lacking for women overall. From my experience the first person I knew personally in this field was a woman, my original mentor in the field was a woman, a woman helped me get my current job in this field, my social media person is a woman, my public relations person is a woman, my master of PPC is a woman, two of my three bosses are women and I've met some extremely knowledgeable women at SESNY and SMX.

I actually agree somewhat - I encounter plenty of women in the field, but I definitely would say that I don't encounter a lot of browns male or female. When I first saw Will Reynolds I was like "Mreahaw?"

Seems like there are just not a lot of minorities in general. But for women, I'd say there are some. More in PPC though than SEO imho.

Congratulations to all the team members of MOZ for presenting the valuable insights of our industry. These are the factors that stroked me more:

The graph of female's has increased which is a very healthy sign.

As Mr.Rand predicts in this post, content marketing type of job titles will raise the eye of recruiters and we can see that it's been the 2nd most important activity but yet the agencies, in-house people and freelancers are not adopting it thoroughly.

Glad to see that people have started to give the emphasis on "Brand Strategy".

Facebook still the no. 1 platform but Pinterest has improved its ranking.

Lastly, businesses have realized the importance of our industry and that's the reason they are happily investing more now. So it means, our salaries will increase. :)

So, we may conclude that after all the drama in 2013 of Not provided, updates, algorithm changes, authorship issues and now the Guest Posting thing, our industry is flourishing quite nicely and it'll always be if we recognize our true potential and give the valuable services that our clients deserves.

Thanks for the data and overview. I always like reading overall industry trend data from someone that has taken the time to gather all the data and figure it all out for me. It is exciting to continue to watch this industry grow and see the different segments within this industry divide and grow as well. Hopefully, salaries & opportunities will continue to move upward as more businesses employ more dollars of their marketing budgets into the digital space.

Very intelligent of you individuals to only post some of the larger results and keep the relax for individuals to make their own research. You individuals are going to get sooo many top quality back-links from this!

I think it's quite funny that link building is not in the top 5 activities anymore, but OSE and Majestic are #3, #4 and ahrefs is #9 in the top SEO tools list. I have a feeling that some of us were too shy to mark link building as a top activity, but looking at competitor websites, the industry is still heavily investing in link building. ;-)

I know that nowadays people tend to shy away from saying they do link building. It's like a "dirty" strategy of the past.

Very interesting indeed, Gyorgy. I guess my one guess as to what this could be is analyzing completely natural inbound links and for link removals, and not for link building directly. The first meaning the analysis of the links that are gained to the quality content that is built to acquire links naturally (content is king, etc etc), and not meant to be pushed out and syndicated everywhere off-site as the old model of link building might have suggested. The second would be using OSE and Majestic to review existing links to a client's site, and using the data there to identify the link as either harmful, neutral, or positive to a website given recent updates by Google and various metrics like number of outbound links and trust/citation flow if you're using Majestic. Just a thought!

Great information here- thanks. The job categories do seem a bit broad though given the huge range of positions and possibility for overlap within each of the categories. For example, would Content Marketing be represented by SEO, Marketing or Content?

I was currently in the process of negotiating my salary for a senior role in a digital agency. This has helped set my sight on a goal... and given me some ideas about negotiating toward it keeping both strengths and weaknesses in perspective.

Nice to see User Experience Professional at no. 2 finally People are giving it importance and its demand is increasing. Thank you Cyrus for writing this amazing post and to Dr.Pete for analyzing this survey data.

First thing it’s not a widget though, secondly widgets are not totally disallowed here is a link from SEroundtable. Many times when we are preparing some references we are not interested in complete source only interested in particle data so it’s worthwhile to break it and made it embeddable. To remain on the safe side embed link could contain brand name (MOZ) as an anchor text.

We can use this strategy as well. Every graph (Information) which we use in our post (if we are original creator of data) should be embeddable so that other user can easily use the graph (Information) as a reference. If this embeddable graphs are against the Google guidelines than they should reconsider it again because it’s actually add value for user.

I'd be interested to know how many people are like me - freelance writers doing lots of content marketing for people, and really getting short-changed most of the time. Boy, I'm not even making $30,000 so I'd have to be left out entirely.

It'd be nice to get a salary, but I'm willing to bet the overwhelming majority of people engaged in those professions you listed above aren't.

I mean, the disposable nature of content marketing pushes employers to find cheap (sorry affordable) solutions. To stay competitive we'll see some of those salaries rise, but fewer positions.

This might clash with those rising budgets, but as you say, the industry is in its infancy - that tells me lots of money is being wasted right now on what we'll later know doesn't work.

Maybe it's just me and that's not the case. Still, half my clients are hiring me on the cheap to clean up what the Big Boys screwed them on.

Greg, I don't want to be disrespectful as I do not know your situation -- but why not demand that you be paid at least what the "Big Boys" paid since you obviously you know more than they did? I remember a certain saying: "If you think paying for quality is expensive, just wait until you pay for cheap." Or something like that.

Regardless, good luck!

The advice I have for digital marketers: specialize! There are a LOT of generalist in any country and throughout the world who know a bit about technical SEO, a bit about social media, a bit about PPC, and so on. But one often becomes truly valuable when he or she can become a renowned expert in just one or a few areas. If I need a PPC person, I want a PPC genius -- and not a generalist.

However, I would add a caveat: This is true often when someone is a freelancer or consultant and/or has an agency that specializes in one area. If a person is in-house or at a large agency and wants to become, say, VP of Digital Marketing, then you need to be more of a generalist.

I meant that if someone is, say, VP of Digital Marketing, then he needs a solid grounding in technical SEO, PPC, conversion optimization, web development, social media, and a lot more -- not to mention the less-exciting things such as management and budgeting and such.

I was meaning exactly what you have written right now... knowing at the best of his own possibilities a wide range of digital marketing facets... like Leonardo who was at the same time an artist, a physician and a engineer.

I think there's a split happening, and a potential danger zone for freelancers. Just like design and coding, content is becoming a commodity. Actually, it's not just content - I hear this among even my writer (fiction writer, that is) friends. As publishing becomes easier and more people want content, someone is always going to be looking for copy on Craig's List for $5/article.

The more demand there is, the more people will jump in to fill that demand, but once you head down that road, you take a very big risk of permanently devaluing your work. It's fine in small doses, and to get started, but we're going to see a split where a ton of people are producing content for pennies and other people are making quite a bit of money.

Before I turned my focus into paid search, I did a lot of freelance content writing for individuals, small companies, and larger enterprises. I genuinely had a lot of fun doing it and really learned a lot more about SEO writing. More importantly, I quickly learned how to create engaging content that drew more eyes and relevant followers.

I definitely became a better, mature writer and I would not change my experience for anything in the world. The hustle was great and it really humbled me, while giving me a heightened sense of respect for freelance content writers. I completely understand what writers go through and I feel like my personal experience in the endeavor will turn out to be a huge asset for me in the future, in some way.

Unfortunately, a lot of people look down on writers (don't give them enough respect), but they'll be a valuable part of the industry in the coming years. As more and more businesses update their blogs and post links on their respective social media channels...you'll need something/someone to be noticed from all the noise. And that's where experienced writers come in!

Just from me to you - keep it up! There's so many avenues you can take from here and that includes starting your own content agency. I guarantee if you continue to work hard, the money will come rolling in, and by then it won't matter as much because you'll be enjoying your field of work.

The learning experience is so valuable, and you can only improve from here on out!

I think one good strategy for an experienced copywriter is finding larger media agencies that continuously buy quality content and pay decent money. I don't mind paying $100 or more for an article that gets the client's marketing and legal approval immediately, because that saves time for everyone. We have a few freelance copywriters and they can make more than $10k a year just from these SEO projects (e.g on-site content, blog posts, guest post, press release, EDM, PDFs, etc).

If you have experience in popular topics like finance, travel, food & drink culture, then you have a much better chance to get work.

Amazing! Thank you for sharing the survey with a lot of information on online marketing strategies. Social media marketing increase the brand visibility if it is used intelligently. The online marketing tools and strategies you discovered are very useful.